The Pali canon describes awakening as the progressive severing of ten fetters that bind a being to samsara: wrong view of self, doubt, and attachment to rites and rituals fall away at the first stage, stream-entry, which guarantees no more than seven further rebirths and none below the human realm. The once-returner weakens sensual desire and ill will further; the non-returner eliminates them entirely and will not be reborn in the human or lower heavens again; the arhat eliminates the five remaining fetters, desire for fine-material and immaterial existence, conceit, restlessness and ignorance, ending rebirth altogether.
The canon presents named arhats as historical figures rather than an abstract ideal: Sariputta and Moggallana, the Buddha's chief disciples, Maha Kassapa, who presided over the first council after the Buddha's death, and Ananda, his attendant, who is said to have attained arhatship on the eve of that council. The Theravada monastic tradition of Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia holds arhatship as the attainable, canonically described goal of a fully realized practitioner, monastic or lay, and forest meditation lineages within Theravada continue to identify individual monks, living and recently deceased, as having reached it, though the tradition treats such claims with considerable caution.